I declined their kind offer as gently as I could, and managed to refrain from teasing Miriam until we’d moved on. But that moment, in its own way, showed just how deeply rooted tribal customs were in the new democracy. Independence in Africa, as Sékou Touré and other new leaders were finding, was hard to achieve, but even harder to manage.
Miriam and I were working beautifully together, united in our desire to bring African music to America, and just as eager to take American folk songs abroad. Our concerts together were always sellouts, and soon we would record an album, An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, consisting only of African songs, that would win a Grammy Award. I’d loved bringing Miriam to American audiences, and since then, I’d also helped the young African horn player Hugh Masekela immigrate to the States. Hugh was Miriam’s boyfriend, and briefly her husband, but he was also a great talent who, like Miriam, quickly made his own career. For me, it was all part of paying off that karmic debt to the legendary jazz players who’d given me my break at the Royal Roost. I was happy to do it. But for Miriam and me, the ride was about to get a little rougher.
Miriam was an international figure now, a top entertainer, and with that profile came the power to speak her mind. In 1963 she’d testified before the United Nations on apartheid, and while the U.S. government hadn’t deported her, South Africa had deprived her of citizenship. Briefly, she was a woman without a country, though Guinea, Belgium, and Ghana issued her passports in solidarity; she ended up with nine altogether. Fortunately, Miriam had brought her daughter, Bongi, to the United States from South Africa, so she was protected that way, too. She earned enough to have a full-time African nanny for Bongi, and a nice New York apartment, which she opened to visiting African students.
Most belonged to activist Stephen Biko’s Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a group more militantly anti-apartheid than Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). I was staunchly pro-ANC, so that caused some tension between Miriam and me. So did the fact that some of the more radical members of SNCC—the ones rejecting nonviolence as a strategy—were hooking up with PAC, often directly through Miriam.
I began to feel Miriam was getting into deep waters, not just politically but personally; there were a lot of drugs in this scene, and not just soft ones. I found myself warning Miriam to clean up her act, which only made her resentful. I could hardly have predicted where Miriam would end up. But the vibes were disturbing.
I can’t remember if, in worrying about Miriam’s career, I worried about my own. Perhaps not. I still sold out amphitheaters; I still commanded top concert fees in Vegas. The truth was, though, that tastes were changing. I had my core audience, both large and global. But the British invasion had begun. In February 1964, the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In about six minutes, they played two songs and changed the world. I was still very hot; the very next month, Ed Sullivan gave me twenty-two minutes on a single show to sing five numbers with backup singers and a band. No one had ever had twenty-two minutes before on Sullivan. But that giddy sense of being the hottest thing in show biz—that would start to fade. My albums would win acclaim, but Belafonte at the Greek Theatre, which came out in 1964—and won a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Recording—would be my last to break the Top 40. No one stays the champ forever.
The very way music was changing—going electric, getting louder—had a profound effect on my voice. I was, at heart, a cabaret singer. I had the chops to play hotel rooms and dinner clubs with a microphone and a single spotlight—I could have done that forever and never lost my voice. Pushing to be heard over Broadway orchestras without a microphone had marred my clarity and tone. As my backup band went electric to keep up with the times, I began to do serious injury to my vocal cords. I didn’t want to go back to Dr. Max Jacobson, who was now treating patients so indiscriminately that he would prescribe amphetamines without even seeing them. Instead, I went to a Dr. Max Salm. He’d treated a lot of stars, which made him arrogant. And the more popular you were, the more arrogant he became. You needed him, he didn’t need you. He really played God. He looked down my throat, saying nothing for what seemed the longest time. “You can rest your voice, and eventually you’ll be fine,” he said when he’d finished his exam.
“How long is ‘eventually’?” I asked.
“Three or four months.”
I gasped. “That would be a catastrophe,” I said. “I can’t cancel that many concerts.”
The doctor shrugged. “Or …,” he said, “you can have me remove the node I see on your vocal cords. Your choice.”
It wasn’t much of a choice. Dr. Salm made his preference clear, and gave me every assurance that all would go well. Who was I to question him? So he gave me a little local anesthetic right there in his office, and “popped out” the node in a matter of minutes. “Now just rest your voice for ten days, and you’ll be fine,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hands.
My voice was never the same. My vocal folds, instead of being parallel, were bowed. And Dr. Salm had left a lot of scar tissue, so the folds could never close correctly after that. I took vocal lessons to try to change the way I sang, to no purposeful end. From critics, I’d never received anything but raves. By the early 1970s, though, I noticed that the critics seemed to be getting younger—the old guys were retiring—and that they had less interest in the songs I sang. I reacted by turning up the volume. The more I did, the more I strained my voice.
Each day, whether or not I had a concert that night, I talked with Martin, or Stan, or Clarence. Often, too, I talked with Bobby, who would remain as U.S. Attorney General for some nine months after his brother’s death.
One day, I got a call from Jim Forman of SNCC, still down in Mississippi. Vietnam was just a smudge on the horizon; President Kennedy had sent advisers, but the Gulf of Tonkin and the military escalation that followed were still months away. Yet a suspicious number of young black men in Mississippi were being drafted. More suspiciously, a lot of them were SNCC volunteers. Coincidence? Jim thought not, as did I. So I called Bobby and told him where I thought this would go. SNCCers who got drafted would either go to Vietnam and become military agitators, or be draft resisters and conscientious objectors. Either way, it wouldn’t help the U.S. military. At the same time, it would kill SNCC’s voter registration drive, which in turn would hurt the Democrats.
There was a long pause on the line.
“Well,” Bobby said at last, “this is not so simple.”
He understood, he said, that southern draft boards were probably going out of their way to draft local SNCCers. But if Bobby was seen as intervening in the recruitment process, that would be toxic for him. Not only would he look unpatriotic; he’d seem to be engaged in a self-serving maneuver to boost the ranks of Democratic voters. Still, he appreciated the problem.
“Who are the most important ones?” he asked.
I rattled off the names of some I thought were in jeopardy, and then Bobby ended our exchange with no commitments. He never called me to say what he’d done, and I never asked. But almost overnight, the all-out campaign to draft SNCCers came to an end.
We spent a lot of time strategizing, in the spring of 1964, about how to help get the civil rights bill passed, and speculating on whether President Johnson was secretly trying to kill it. At that moment, its outcome was uncertain at best. The House had passed it, but in the Senate, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd was leading a filibuster that would last fifty-seven days. Even if it did pass, we’d come to realize, it was only half a loaf. It outlawed discrimination in public places based on race, color, or national origin, and it called for desegregating public schools. But while it also declared that voters be treated equally, it failed to rule out literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics meant to keep poor blacks from the voting booth. Integrating lunch counters, bathrooms, and schools was important, but without a free and fair vote, southern blacks would still be second-class citizens in a racist society, with absolutely no political power.
The big debate that spring was about who we should enlist. Black college students would be at far greater risk in rural Mississippi than white students. A lot more white students were lining up, too. In the Northeast’s top colleges, heading south for the summer to register black voters suddenly seemed the thing to do: a noble mission and, as much, a real adventure. But a lot of SNCCers balked at the prospect of Harvard men and Yalies swarming into Greenwood and brandishing their Ivy League educations. Since I was supplying a lot of the bankroll, I got to weigh in on that, and what I thought was: Hell, yes, bring on the white students. I knew that to a growing number of SNCCers, the movement had taken on new meaning: not integration but a separate and equal black society. That wasn’t my view. I shared Martin’s dream, of a world in which no one’s skin color made him better, or different. It was the reason I pushed so hard to have white students come to Mississippi.
SNCC wasn’t the only group that launched Mississippi Freedom Summer. CORE was another. In fact, two of the three young activists who vanished on June 21, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were affiliated with CORE; the third, Andrew Goodman, was from SNCC. By then, the Democrats had broken the filibuster on the civil rights bill, and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2. As we feared, it did nothing to protect the voting rights of poor southern blacks; we would have to bring mass registration drives into every southern state. Our only other choice was to push for a new federal voting rights bill, which seemed a near-impossible feat. Whatever course we chose, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman would not be with us. On August 4, FBI agents, acting on a tip, found their bodies buried on a farm near Philadelphia, Mississippi. (Not by chance would Ronald Reagan choose to declare his first presidential candidacy in that bloodstained town. Whites and blacks would know all too well that he was signaling his support of Jim Crow.)That was when Jim Forman called me, desperate to keep Mississippi Freedom Summer alive, and Sidney and I found ourselves flying to Jackson with that doctor’s satchel.
Walking with Sidney into that Elks Hall in Greenwood to jubilant cheers would be one of the most gratifying moments of my life. But Greenwood was scary—it really was. Standing before that audience, I wondered if some Klansman wasn’t fixing us in his crosshairs, about to squeeze off a shot. I felt ashamed of that thought as I scanned the crowd and noticed how many had bandaged heads and arms. Among the thousand brave souls who fanned out each day that summer with clipboards in hand, some inevitably came back beaten and bloodied. But my fear returned in the morning, when Sidney and I spent some time at Greenwood’s latest SNCC headquarters—another wood-frame house, not burned down yet—and strolled down Main Street. Nearly everyone—white and black—was armed. We saw black farmers brandishing shotguns, unheard of in the South, staring down whites who rolled by in pickups with full rifle racks. This was war.
When we gave the SNCCers that money, I set aside $10,000 of it as a reserve. With any luck, they could get their army of volunteers through August on the other $60,000. Seeing how frayed everyone’s nerves were in Greenwood, I had a thought as to how that $10,000 should then be spent: on a recuperative getaway for ten or twelve of the SNCCers who’d carried the heaviest burdens these last three years. I saw signs of serious fatigue among them, and I felt very concerned for their emotional welfare. I feared that without some sort of physical and spiritual rest, grave mistakes would be made and our cause derailed. I wanted to take them somewhere far away from Mississippi, somewhere they’d never imagined visiting but would excite them as soon as they heard the name: Guinea, in West Africa.
I first bounced the idea off Achar Maroff, Guinea’s ambassador to the United Nations, whom I’d first met through Eleanor Roosevelt, and through whom I’d first gone to Guinea as Sékou Touré’s guest. Africa was a subject of growing fascination throughout the movement. Many SNCCers were talking about reconnecting with their African roots. Some, most notably a young, ambitious northerner named Stokely Carmichael, were donning African tribal clothes. (I would notice, over the next years, that it was always SNCCers from north of the Mason-Dixon Line who wore African dress; southern blacks had no interest.) Yet none had actually gone to Africa. Seeing Guinea would be a life-changing experience for these battle-weary veterans, and I knew President Sékou Touré would enjoy meeting them. Achar’s eyes lit up at the idea. In just days word came: The young Americans were invited, and would be given all the attentions accorded to foreign dignitaries.
Rest was needed all the more after the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in late August and its heartbreaking floor fight. To break the lock that white segregationists had on Mississippi’s state delegation, Bob Moses had founded a new Mississippi Freedom Democratic party. If he could just get enough Democratic delegates from other states to give the MFDP their blessing, its own, mostly black delegates would be seated and given the power to vote. A lot of Democratic delegates around the country strongly sympathized with the MFDP—they’d seen those pictures of Birmingham and other brutal confrontations, and wanted to help. But to President Johnson, this was an appalling prospect; the whole yellow-dog Democratic South might well walk out of the convention if the MFDP was seated, dooming his election hopes. No one was a shrewder strategist than LBJ. All too soon, despite widespread support, the MFDP was iced out of the proceedings.
For that and a hundred other reasons, Bob Moses was the first name on my list for the Guinea trip. He tried to back out, claiming he didn’t want special treatment, but the others brought him around. Another clear choice was John Lewis, who’d nearly lost his life at that Montgomery bus station, and risked it many times since. And then there was baby-faced Julian Bond, who ran SNCC’s office in Atlanta. James Forman joined the list. Along with a handful of others, we added Fannie Lou Hamer, who’d worked so hard to launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party. Fannie Lou’s speech on the floor of the Democratic Convention had been so riveting—and so powerful, broadcast as it was on national television—that President Johnson had sent word to the press corps that he had an urgent announcement to make, just to preempt the live coverage of Fannie Lou, then nattered away about nothing as the cameras rolled. Fannie was one of the great leaders of our movement, a Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter who’d faced armed southern troopers without fear and had a limp, the result of a brutal beating, to show for it. If anyone deserved a vacation, it was Fannie.
We left for Senegal on September 11, 1964, and flew from there to Conakry on Air Guinée, which in itself was a shock for some in the group: The pilot and the flight attendants were black! Presidential emissaries were there to whisk us through security in seconds, then drive us in long black cars to the former French embassy, a sprawling estate with beachfront bungalows. Dinner, we were told, would be at the presidential palace in an hour or two. We were settling in, and unpacking, when President Sékou Touré drove up, unannounced, to welcome us personally. Most of us gathered ourselves pretty quickly, but when I knocked on Fannie Lou Hamer’s bungalow door, I heard her singing in the bathroom.
“Fannie, the president is here. Can you come?”
Fannie whooped with laughter. “Yeah, right,” she said. “Well, just tell His Excellency that I’ll see him in a couple of hours. I’m having my bath, darling.�
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“Fannie, I’m telling you—the president is here.”
There was a silence.
“Are you telling the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Good Lord, you’re serious!” Then a lot of splashing.
Five or six minutes later, Fannie Lou emerged, her hair still wringing wet. She stopped dead when she saw Sékou Touré, in his white fez and white robes, flashing a grin of welcome at her. He came over, kissed her on each cheek, and said how pleased he was to meet her. With that, Fannie threw her arms around him, buried her face in his chest, and wept.
I understood completely. Neither Fannie nor any of the others had ever seen a black head of state. The very idea, after enduring beatings and police dogs and constant oppression by the only authority figures they knew—white ones—was overwhelming. To these bone-tired activists, Sékou Touré was a symbol of true freedom and self-rule. To have him sweep in, with his title and authority, and say, “Welcome home”—well, it was no wonder Fannie dissolved in tears. The rest of the eyes there weren’t so dry, either.
True to his word, Sékou Touré treated our group like dignitaries, hosting feasts and spectacular displays of Guinean drumming and dancing. I went along for some of that, but I also had work to do; my plans for a cultural center in Conakry were well under way. Initially, I had hoped to have the program staffed by Peace Corps volunteers, but when I’d sent that suggestion up the chain of command, it had been quashed. I knew that wasn’t Sarge Shriver’s fault. No U.S. administration was going to help Guinea as long as France was boycotting it. Instead, we’d recruited some twenty American theater hands to live in the capital and travel around the country, researching and recording tribal artists and rituals. I’d paid those salaries myself—and was still paying them, except during the occasional stretches when we landed private funding.
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